For this week post, i wanted to put up the most insane and impressive kuduro videos I've found on the net. According to the guy I met at the record store in Paris, the handicapped guy you can see in this vids is a celebrity in Angola, Cap-Vert and Portugal (the 3 countries where kuduro is played). Here's two of his videos.

As you can hear in the interview in the Mad Decent Podcast dedicated to Kuduro, the Kuduro style is also related to a choreography. There's plenty of them and the mc's are dropping and shouting names of dance moves to the crowd, just like they do in Jamaica or during block parties. You'll see also a lot of dance competition circle in the videos on the net and find DVDs to learn how to dance kuduro. Again, this is a great example about how musics and dances from West Africa, Caribbean Islands and black north America are intricated. Not only in the music itself, but also in the way it's lived and theatrically expressed.The most impressive move in my opinion is the one when they jump, do a flip and crash on their back intentionally. They're also weird figures where they act like mentally disabled or physically handicapped people, which almost bring the dance to some kind of comedy act (like also when they act like stereotyped gay). This specific dance moves, and even more evidently the one-legged man in this two videos, are most probably showing and expressing the results of almost 30 years of civil war, which brought Angola to be one of the poorest country in Africa.

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PUTO PRATA

On the mp3 side, I wanted to focus on Puto Prata, a young MC that is really doing upper level kuduro shit. Most of the time the music is really great, aggressive and well produced, which isn't like the majority of the tracks I've found, and his flow is always on top. I bought his last album in Paris and it's really good, so here's 5 tracks of Puto Prata, not all from the album:

2 commentaires:

it's really interesting to me to see the similarity (as yall mention) in the dancing, particularly some of the moves are exaclty as in vogueing at house balls in the US - mainly east coast like nyc, dc, philly, bmore - where (mainly black) gay/bi men and trans women compete and perform - of coruse captured in publc imagination by "paris is burning" and madonna's cooption (via the legendary willie ninja -rip) but living on and evolving every day at every ball. one aspect that is not part of the "traditional" ball but much newer is that same jump and land on that back technique...